Yuki Takahashi

Despite the negligible gender gap in mathematics and sciences in OECD countries, female students remain less likely to major in STEM in college. One potential explanation is that these fields are male-dominated, making female students a minority. We investigate whether the gender ratio at colleges affects high school students' college choices. Using an incentivized discrete choice experiment, we show that both female and male students prefer gender-balanced college programs over male- or female-majority ones. The primary reason students avoid being a minority is concern about the difficulty of adapting to such environments. Furthermore, female students require compensation equivalent to nearly a two-standard-deviation increase in college quality to attend STEM programs that they correctly perceive as male-majority. We find no evidence of preference heterogeneity based on academic performance, socioeconomic background, or between STEM and non-STEM programs. These findings suggest that promoting gender balance in colleges can lead to a more efficient allocation of talent.

In a laboratory experiment with eye tracking and using gender stereotypes, this paper demonstrates that decision-makers allocate less attention to negatively stereotyped individuals than to positively stereotyped individuals when finding the better-performing individuals and more attention to negatively stereotyped individuals than to positively stereotyped individuals when finding the worse-performing individuals. This selective attention has consequences for the accuracy of performance evaluations: decision-makers provide less accurate evaluations of negatively stereotyped individuals than of positively stereotyped individuals when finding the better-performing individuals. The differences in attention and evaluation accuracy are not driven by individuals’ actual performance. Showing continuous performance information does not override stereotypes. These findings suggest that stereotypes can lead to suboptimal selection of talent and harm negatively stereotyped individuals, such as when managers decide which workers to promote and dismiss.

In a quasi-laboratory experiment, I show that individuals are less willing to collaborate with those who corrected them, even when the correction benefited the team. The likely mechanism is negative feedback aversion: more confident individuals are much less willing to collaborate with those who corrected their mistakes but not those who corrected their right actions. Additionally, I find suggestive evidence that men, but not women, are less willing to collaborate with women who corrected their mistakes, potentially due to (inaccurate) beliefs about women's abilities. This reluctance to collaborate with those who corrected them can undermine teamwork, especially in mixed-gender teams.

Light abuses and threats to receive them at home can deteriorate individuals' well-being, even in the absence of severe physical injury. Leveraging Russia's criminal law reform that decriminalized minor domestic violence, I first confirm that the number of domestic violence incidents classified as criminal offenses against female partners indeed decreased sharply after the reform. Using a difference-in-differences approach, I then show that the reform reduced married women's life satisfaction, increased depression, and increased college-educated married women's alcohol intake. Suggestive evidence indicates that the reform contributed to a decline in new marriages, while the divorce rate remained unchanged. These changes are unlikely to stem from shifts in violence outside the household, as there were no significant changes in gender-based violence or other crimes during the same period. These findings suggest that even minor intimate partner violence decreases married women's well-being and highlights the importance of legal institutions in addressing household violence.

Although evidence suggests men are more generous to women than to men, it may stem from paternalism and could reverse when women excel in important skills for one's career success, such as cognitive skills. Using a dictator game, this paper studies whether male dictators allocate less to female receivers than to male receivers when these receivers have higher IQs than dictators. By exogenously varying the receivers' IQ relative to the dictators', I do not find evidence consistent with this hypothesis; if anything, male dictators allocate slightly more to female receivers with higher IQs than to male receivers with equivalent IQs. The results hold both in mean and distribution and are robust to the so-called ``beauty premium.'' Also, female dictators' allocations are qualitatively similar to male dictators. These findings suggest that women who excel in cognitive skills may not receive less favorable treatment than equally intelligent men in the labor market.